The State of GTM Jobs: Sales

Data report on sales role trends in collaboration with Live Data Technologies

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Sep 18, 2024

This is a special edition of The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow - read by over 52,000 revenue professionals weekly to stay up-to-date on go-to-market and scale their companies and careers. GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund - sharing go-to-market advice from the top 1% of revenue operators including the 350 executives behind the fund, news, and our viewpoints from working with hundreds of portfolio companies.

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The State of Sales Jobs

From week to week, it can feel like sales roles are up, and the next down.

Understanding what’s truly happening in the SaaS startup jobs space can be challenging, so a closer look at the data offers valuable insights.

A huge thank you to Jason Saltzman and Live Data Technologies for generously allowing us to tap into their data to help surface the latest trends in go-to-market teams at startups. This data is typically safeguarded behind paid offerings, as the company leverages prompt engineering of major search engines to capture real-time job change data, tracking over 88 million professionals.

The TL;DR:

Sales role hiring is rebounding in 2024 after a difficult 2023.
Mid-level roles like Managers, Directors, and Leadership positions tend to have the longest tenures (2.5 to 3 years), while both senior roles (CROs) and individual contributors (AEs and SDRs) have shorter tenures (1.5 to 2 years).
SDR hiring is declining, while AE hiring remains steady and shows gradual growth.
Companies are increasingly prioritizing senior-level hires, favoring more experienced talent who can take on broader responsibilities.

Details below - let’s get into it.

Sales role growth

Sales roles were broken out by seniority and accompanying title variations.

To interpret these charts, if the growth index on the y-axis is 110, this means there are 10% more roles compared to 2022 when the base index of 100 was set.

Last year through to March of this year saw negative growth in sales roles, with more companies shedding employees than adding.

There’s a clear dip in Q1 2023 with substantial negative net departures. During this period, there seems to have been a large-scale reduction in sales teams, likely due to market conditions, monetary policy, or growth strategy shifts. This dip continues through the year, though there’s a gradual recovery from mid-2023 onward.

Now, there has been a general resurgence of hiring in 2024 after a difficult 2023. We’ll see how this sticks through to 2025.

Tenure of sales roles

Average tenure for all is less than 4 years, with most falling between 2-3 years.

However, tenure varies significantly depending on the role.

Higher-level roles like Managers, Directors, and Leadership positions tend to have longer tenures, generally hovering around 2.5 to 3 years. This aligns with expectations, as these roles often come with more responsibility, require longer ramp-up times, and are typically more stable.

In contrast, individual contributor roles such as SDRs and AEs exhibit significantly shorter tenures, averaging closer to 1.5 to 2 years. SDRs and AEs, in particular, tend to be early-career roles, which often experience higher turnover as people move to other positions or advance up the career ladder.

CROs (green line) show one of the shortest tenures, with most staying in the role for less than 2 years on average. This may reflect the high-pressure nature of the CRO role, where frequent leadership changes are common due to performance expectations or strategic shifts.

Interestingly, there is an improvement in tenure for certain roles, particularly toward the end of 2024, suggesting that companies may be implementing retention strategies or that market conditions are stabilizing for specific roles.

Growth of roles

While SDR and AE roles had similar hiring trends in 2022, their trajectories have drastically diverged since then. SDR hiring has plunged, whereas AE hiring has remained relatively stable.

Sales teams are undergoing a notable shift, with AEs increasingly taking on the role of primary sellers, while SDR positions have become leaner.

In Q1 2022, the Role Growth Index for SDRs was high, peaking around 108. However, by Q1 2023, SDR hiring began a steep decline, falling below 90 by Q4 2023. This suggests that companies are significantly reducing their reliance on SDRs, possibly due to strategic changes, evolving go-to-market models, or the automation of tasks typically handled by SDRs.

In Q3 of 2023, there were approximately 35,000 SDR roles at companies under 1,000 employees. One year later in Q3 of 2024, there are approximately 32,000 SDR roles at the same companies - a reduction of nearly 6%.

In contrast, the Role Growth Index for AEs has stayed fairly stable, hovering around 102 between Q1 2022 and Q3 2023. By Q3 2024, it shows a slight upward trend, indicating that companies are leaning more heavily on AEs. This trend suggests that AEs are now taking on more direct selling responsibilities, possibly consolidating roles that were once shared between SDRs and AEs.

Companies are increasingly relying on AEs for both lead qualification and direct selling, while SDR roles are declining. This change may be driven by the rise of automation tools and AI, which are handling many of the repetitive tasks traditionally done by SDRs.

Companies are helping to streamline processes with data and workflows, further reducing the burden on sales teams. For example, Operator (a recent GTMfund incubation) gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.

Tools like Attention enable reps to compress weeks of work into a few minutes.

As a result, AEs are now operating more frequently in a full-cycle capacity. Feedback from GTM leaders echoes this notion.

“We’ve made a number of changes and realigned our business model in 2024 to make our AEs full cycle. For a startup, I believe full cycle is the only way to go. While many argue AEs should focus on new logos, for us, signing big companies like Intuit means that upselling and expanding those accounts are more valuable than most of our regular customers.”
– James Kaikis, Head of GTM at TestBox.

Continuing the trend of senior roles taking on broader responsibilities, Director-level roles have seen a significant increase, while Manager-level roles are steadily declining.

The same effect is seen between the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and leadership roles.

Companies are investing in more senior employees. In startups, speed is currency. Having more senior people who have “been there, done that” can expedite growth. It may come at a price, but that price if often worth it in the long run.

It may also reflect changing organizational structures where senior leaders take on more responsibilities, potentially reducing the need for multiple layers of management.

It could also be that teams are finding greater agility with more lean teams, recognizing impact of the phenomenon Price’s Law. Price's Law states that "the square root of the number of employees in a company do about half the work". In a 400-person company, that's just 20 people! Full breakdown of Price’s Law here.

Who is hiring?

There are 100,000+ sales roles currently open at startups.

Below are some open roles, with GTMfund portfolio companies highlighted in bold.

CRO

Chief Revenue Officer at Sage (New York)
Chief Revenue Officer at Teramind (US/UK/Canada)
Chief Revenue Officer at EngineAI (US/UK)

Regional VP of Sales at OfferFit (Remote - US/Canada)
SVP, Global Sales at Amperity (Seattle)
VP of Sales at Skai (San Francisco)

Director

Director of Sales at Cribl (Remote - Atlanta)
Director of Sales Operations, Sales Development at Zscaler (Remote - US)
Director of Sales at Amper (Chicago)

Manager

Enterprise Sales Manager (West Coast) at Vanta (Remote - US)
Manager, Sales at Owner (Remote - US)
Sales Operations Manager at Docker (Remote - US/Canada/Mexico)

Founding AE at CandorIQ (San Francisco)
Account Executive (Mid-market) at Clariti (Remote - US/Canada)
SMB, Account Executive at Capchase (London)

SDR

Founding Sales Development Rep at Magical (Toronto)
Senior Business Development Representative (BDR) at Stotles (London)
Sales Development Representative at Tavus (San Francisco - Remote)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you share on social, don’t forget to tag GTMnow so we can see your takeaways and help amplify them.

This is the first part of a series about The State of GTM Jobs, which will be released over the rest of the year, including analyses of the data on jobs in marketing, customer success, and more.

🤝 Sophie